Tectonic Hazards - Disaster Trends, Mega Disasters & Multi-Hazard Zones

  • Trends are changes over time which can include: Death, number of people affected and cost.
  • The number of earthquakes and volcanoes has been fluctuating recently but it hasn’t really increased
  • Flood events are rapidly rising along with hurricanes and lots of droughts.
  • The number of deaths is decreasing because High resilience between people, better building codes, better education, more money from governments and aid charities along with better health care.
  • The number of people affected has exponentially increased because of Big populations, more people living in urban areas which are not suited to disasters.
  • More economic damage because: we have more items which are more expensive, value of property has increased and more people are claiming on insurance
  • The number of reported disasters has also increased because the better technology to record disasters, more insurance to claim from disasters and more people = more chances of disasters.
Tectonic Mega-Disasters:
  • An extremely large disaster with huge impacts on a large scale.
  • Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption, Iceland 2010, MEDC.
  • Ash from VEI 2 eruption spread over Europe, flights were cancelled across Europe, £1.1 billion in economic costs to businesses and tourism but there were not any deaths.
Multi-Hazard Zones:
  • Areas that have more than one hazards at once.
  • The Philippines, hydro-meteorological hazards. Mount Pinatubo 1991, the eruption had a volcano, typhoon and a flood all happening at once. The Philippines has a high vulnerability, low resilience, low capacity to cope and high-risk level to high hazard exposure
  • On a destructive margin where the Eurasian and the Chilean plate collided.
  • The typhoon caused flooding and high-speed winds at the same time.
  • Hazard profiles showed a high exposure to all the hazards at the time
  • In a subduction zone with a high earthquake zone.
  • Typhoon Yunya hit the area which caused floods. Rain mixed with ash which formed Lahars. 300 died from this despite evacuating the area for the initial volcano.